Jesus Justice: So Easy A Five Year Old Can Do It?

Jeremy Del Rio, UYWI 2008

Jesus the Justice Advocate may not be standard Sunday school fare, yet He began his ministry by declaring his heart for justice in a concrete mission statement to preach good news to the poor. He loves justice so much that he embeds it into how we inherit eternal life. Why then can 5-year olds understand justice better than so many adults, and what can we learn from them to make justice a lifestyle?

Courtesy: UYWI

Related

+ Download the Jesus Justice Powerpoint and related materials here.

Downloads

+ PowerPoint here
+ “Jesus Justice” article (Youth Workers Journal, 2007)
+ Audio coming soon.

The Jesus Justice article from last spring is making a second wave of appearances in various forms this fall. The Youth Ministry Exchange just posted the complete, 3,000-word version here. Tri-State Voice published a shorter version (2,700 words) in its September print issue; a still shorter version appears as a devotional in the recently released “Revive us Again” devotional book (COPGNY); and in November, Charisma magazine will publish the 750-word edition as part of its “Emerging Voices” column series.

Related

+ “The Myspace Cry”, Charisma (Feb 2007)

Part 5 of 5

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[This is reprinted from the May-June issue of the Journal of Student Ministries.]

Jesus loves justice so much that he built it into his response to the most fundamental of evangelical questions: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

The question sounds innocent enough, but its questioner, a lawyer, was attempting to test Jesus. Jesus deftly turns the tables. “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” he asked. The man replied simply: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

“You have answered correctly,” Jesus said. “Do this and you will live” (Luke 10:25-28).

Do this, and you will live. Coming from Jesus, those six little words burst with meaning. The unending life he offers brings joy and peace and abundance, and its citizenship rests in his Kingdom. If that’s the life to which we aspire, we must first understand “this” thing he requires of us.

Curiously, “this” is not the salvation formulation we evangelicals describe. There’s nothing in the lawyer’s response about repeating a prayer or responding to an altar call or attending a 12-week discipleship class. Instead this life he promises grows in proportion to obedience to three—not two—commands.

It begins by loving God, and receiving the grace his love offers.

It continues by loving your neighbor.

And it’s sustained, perhaps most difficult of all, by loving ourselves enough to receive God’s justice in our own lives.

This third command is easy to overlook. Still, it’s there as the standard by which the other two are measured. It’s there when Jesus explains how we love God: with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind. If we resent who we are—if we think we’re not smart enough or we’re too weak or too unattractive or too emotional—then we’re withholding our love for him. He wants us in our entirety, withholding nothing. It’s also there when Jesus says love your neighbor “as yourself.” Kingdom love for neighbor requires first appreciating and respecting who the King made us to be. Apostle Paul calls this offering ourselves as, “a living sacrifice…our reasonable act of worship” (Romans 12:1-3). Everything else, including the capacity to view our neighbors through the prism of heaven, flows from that.

The lawyer understood the self-love part of the equation. Brimming with self-confidence, he was, after all, attempting to trap the incarnated Word in a battle of words. But “wanting to justify himself,” he comes back for more and asks the critical question: “Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus responds with a parable about a man on a journey, as so many of his stories are. On an isolated stretch of road, thieves rob him, beat him, and leave him for dead, battered and bloodied in a ditch. In time, the local priest (or, in our context, the pastor) passes by on his way to the synagogue (a.k.a., the church). Too hurried to stop, he crosses the street and pretends not to notice. Then a Levite (the worship leader) also approaches, perhaps on the way to the same church. He follows the pastor’s lead and similarly ignores the man.

Then a Samaritan rounds the corner. Unlike the pastor and worship leader, he doesn’t pretend not to see. Kingdom compassion compels him to right wrongs wherever he finds them, so he rolls up his sleeves and prepares to get dirty. In the process, this righteous Samaritan extended justice where a self-righteous pastor would not.

Why did Jesus make the “neighbor” in his story a Samaritan? Why not the priest or the Levite? Why not a Jewish layman? The Jews to whom he was preaching, even Jesus’ own disciples, reviled Samaritans. Most infamously, in Luke 9—the chapter before this parable—Jesus rebuked James and John (the disciple whom “he loved”) for praying that fire would consume a Samaritan village.

Samaritans were hated because they descended from Assyrian soldiers who centuries earlier had conquered Israel and marched all the able-bodied survivors across the desert as slaves. The infirmed and vulnerable who were left behind—women, children, and the elderly—were pillaged and raped. When exiled Jews returned years later, they found children fathered by the Assyrian conquistadors. These they called Samaritans, and their presence in Israel reminded Jews of slavery, colonialism, and injustice.

Yet this Samaritan’s love mirrors God’s Kingdom love. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus tells the lawyer.

Learn to love like this Samaritan loved. Then you’ll truly live.

How the Samaritan demonstrated love is much the same way my son prays for Lonnie. The Samaritan understood that Kingdom love moves beyond compassion to justice.

Compassion compelled the Samaritan to respond to the bloody mass of human flesh beside the road. But justice kept him there. Kingdom justice required him to get dirty, and restoring Shalom meant overcoming the absence of adequate remedies for the battered man’s need. There was no 911 operator to call or even the technology to reach out for help. There were no EMTs to provide urgent care and high-speed transports to a hospital. There wasn’t an appropriate health-care facility nearby, and no insurance or Medicaid to finance treatment.

Yet Shalom came to the man because the Samaritan was willing not only to sit with him in the ditch, give him water, and bandage his wounds (a compassionate response), but also to transport him to an inn, personally nurse him overnight, and prepay his medical expenses. Compassion, as commonly practiced in evangelical ministries today, would have served the man but stopped short of healing him. Instead, Jesus justice righted the wrongs that left him in the ditch. Jesus justice healed him, reconciled him, and restored him to wholeness.
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Jesus righted the wrongs in our lives—restored us to justice—by laying down his life so that we might truly live.

Five-year olds understand that.

The Samaritan, marginalized though he was, embodied it.

Will you?

Part 3 of 5

[Part 2]
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[This is reprinted from the May-June issue of the Journal of Student Ministries.]

The concept of Shalom expresses this best. In his book Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, British theologian N.T. Wright describes biblical justice as “putting the world to rights.” It’s the fulfillment, as Paul wrote, of all creation’s waiting “in eager expectation” to be “liberated from its bondage to decay” (Romans 8:19-23), or what the Old Testament calls Shalom. More than the absence of strife, Shalom is the kind of peace that holds the far reaches of the universe together. It’s what the Prince of peace came to reestablish by overcoming the devastating consequences of sin: the interdependency of healthy communities; the functioning of our physiology; the manifold mysteries of a mother’s love; the splendor of the cosmos; and the microscopic intricacy of subatomic matter.

Dr. Tim Keller, founder and senior pastor of Manhattan’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, describes Shalom as the webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in a state of universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight. It’s an intricately woven garment that diminishes when things unravel physically, psychologically, and economically. Social unraveling comes when people who “have” hold on to their blessing rather than thrusting it out and interweaving it with those who “have not.”

The condition of sin robs us of Shalom, which Kingdom justice restores. The catch is that justice isn’t forced upon us. It comes as we change our priorities and hunger and thirst after it with a poverty of spirit that allows us to mourn its absence.

Kids know this well. Cries of fairness ring out on playgrounds every day. Prayers to heal broken relationships echo in homes every night.

But somehow as we age, the belief that things can fundamentally change tends to diminish. At the very least, lifetimes of hurt and disappointment jade us. Sometimes they make us cynical. And we forget that justice is possible.

Perhaps that’s why Jesus said we must first become like children before we can enter his Kingdom.

[Part 4 coming Saturday]

Part 2 of 5

[Part 1]

[This is reprinted from the May-June issue of the Journal of Student Ministries.]

“Why didn’t we help that man?”

As Judah’s confused yet compassionate eyes gazed at mine, his words cut deep. We had just passed a panhandler in Chinatown on the way to introduce mom to soupy dumplings. I had taken him the night before, just the two of us, on a father-son outing. He enjoyed the dumplings so much, and the practice chopsticks the waiter taught him how to use, that he wanted to bring mom the next night.

What do you mean, “Why didn’t we help?” I thought. We’re on family time. The rationalization didn’t cut it for me, however, so I figured it would mean even less to him. So I promised Judah that if the man was still there after we ate then we could give him some money.

On the way back to the car, we passed the man a second time. No longer panhandling, he sat on a stoop with his head between his legs. I gave Judah a handful of coins and took him to the man. “Excuse me,” I said. “My son has something he wants to give you.”

Slowly the man raised his head and watched Judah approach, hand outstretched. The man grabbed his hand and with tears welling up in his eyes, said, “God loves you, boy.” Later Judah offered him his ice cream cone and the tears streamed down his face.

The ice broken, the man introduced himself as Lonnie. He said he’s been strung out for 30 years and homeless for 25. At one time he was a Christian, but he turned his back on God and became hooked on crack cocaine and alcohol. He said he’s been off drugs for 12 years, but the booze he can’t shake. He wept as he told me that Judah was the sixth person who stopped to show him God’s love that day.

He kept saying he was scared, afraid that he would go to sleep and not wake up. Judah looked at him lovingly, straight in the eyes and said: “Everyone is scared of something.” With that, more tears.

Lonnie was chilly, so we gave him Judah’s beach towel from the car, and a brand new Bible I had bought for myself that weekend. But first he asked if Judah would pray for him. He did, along with mom and dad.

There we stood, on the corner of Bayard and Mott Streets, around the corner from the ice cream shop, minutes removed from soupy dumplings, spending quality time with Jesus—in the person of a homeless man.

“Inasmuch as you’ve [loved] the least of these,” Jesus said, “you’ve done it unto me.”

Family time, indeed. The best kind.
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Eighteen months later, Judah still prays for Lonnie at bedtime. What’s so striking to me is not that he prays (which, as his dad, I think is pretty cool in itself), but rather how he prays: “God, help Lonnie not be homeless anymore. Give him a home.”

After our conversation last August, I realized that Judah had been praying like this all along. Intuitively, this little boy understood that justice is more than just acknowledging difficulties when they exist. It’s more than just covering problems with Band Aids, masking symptoms, or throwing money at them to make them go away.

Justice is about righting the underlying wrongs that create the problems in the first place. It’s about restoring balance, renewing hope, and reconciling fractured communities.

[Part 3 coming on Thursday]